to disperse his fire
during a general attack on a wide front. In the days of trench warfare,
when the enemy artillery was much stronger than ours, and when his
infantry strength was enormously greater, our generals insisted upon
the British troops maintaining an "aggressive" attitude, with the result
that they were shot to pieces, instead of adopting, like the French, a
quiet and waiting attitude until the time came for a sharp and terrible
blow. The battles of Neuve Chapelle, Fertubert, and Loos, in 1915,
cost us thousands of dead and gave us no gain of any account; and both
generalship and staff-work were, in the opinion of most officers who
know anything of those battles, ghastly.

After all, our generals had to learn their lesson, like the private
soldier, and the young battalion officer, in conditions of warfare which
had never been seen before--and it was bad for the private soldier and
the young battalion officer, who died so they might learn. As time
went on staff-work improved, and British generalship was less rash in
optimism and less rigid in ideas.

XVI

General Haldane was friendly to the war correspondents--he had been
something of the kind himself in earlier days--and we were welcomed at
his headquarters, both when he commanded the 3d Division and afterward
when he became commander of the 6th Corps. I thought during the war, and
I think now, that he had more intellect and "quality" than many of
our other generals. A tall, strongly built man, with a distinction of
movement and gesture, not "stocky" or rigid, but nervous and restless,
he gave one a sense of power and intensity of purpose. There was a
kind of slow-burning fire in him--a hatred of the enemy which was not
weakened in him by any mercy, and a consuming rage, as it appeared to
me, against inefficiency in high places, injustice of which he may have
felt himself to be the victim, and restrictions upon his liberty of
command. A bitter irony was often in his laughter when discussing
politicians at home, and the wider strategy of war apart from that
on his own front. He was intolerant of stupidity, which he found
widespread, and there was no tenderness or emotion in his attitude
toward life. The officers and men under his command accused him of
ruthlessness. But they admitted that he took more personal risk than
he need have done as a divisional general, and was constantly in the
trenches examining his line. They also acknowledged that he w